Sixteenth Issue: Utopias

Every utopia is a dystopia. There’s no such thing as a perfect world because everyone has a different idea of what perfect might be. In fact you could probably trace most genocide in human history to one group of people’s opinion that to create a utopia for them, all who disagreed had to be eliminated. I’m looking at smaller utopias though, not the kind that take over a whole country and start wars but more of those that are considered part of the movement of communes and intentional communities largely in the 1960s and 70s. The vast majority of them began and ended quietly and peacefully, I would imagine, and of course the ones that start controversy or end in death are the ones we hear more about. Some of them became cults. Some of them fizzled out with little fanfare. I find them all completely fascinating, so I decided to make a chart showing some of the more famous ones and then look a little at some that are operating today with a more modern twist. If there are famous communes or cults that I missed please tell me about them I really want to know. I am fascinated by them.

(Sorry this chart is so small but you should be able to click it to zoom in and make it bigger!)

Interestingly enough, intentional communities fail at a rate around the same of most start-up companies. Usually intentional communities are prompted by a discontent with the current, modern society. There have been upticks in the mid 19^th century, then again in the 1960s, at least in the Western world. Many of them have become cults, but many others are not trying anything that grandiose. A lot of them fall apart for the same reason that start-ups do – someone has a great idea but doesn’t have the practical skills to actually put it into place. Some of them fall apart for strange reasons like false prophecies, weird sexual politics, charismatic/tyrannical founders, and more, but a lot of them also fall apart for more mundane reasons – running out of money, arguing about how resources should be divided, and failing to attract newer people and younger generations. People argue that communal living is like going back in time, but the most long lasting intentional communities don’t shun the modern world completely.
Money is a huge issue. Many intentional communities are sustained by private donations, much like how many start ups first begin. People have to work hard to make it. Many intentional communities just want to be self-sustainable, but others, like Freetown Christiania above, find other ways to make money, like tourism and selling marijuana. Other religious communities leverage that, charging people to learn meditation and other spiritual practices. Generally, things like celibacy aren’t going to attract new members and is not a good idea for your intentional community – just ask the Shakers. They used to have over six thousand members, known for their farming and furniture making, but not allowing each other to have babies doesn’t really work so great for your community to survive. Margaret Atwood says of intentional communities: What sort of happiness is on offer, and what is the price we might pay to achieve it?’ The puritan impulse towards the suppression of passion, like Penn’s insistence on sobriety, was a high price to pay for belonging. But the loose sexual practices of secular communes in the 1960s and ’70s created immense jealousies and conflicts that just as readily caused many communities to implode. Most people, of course, flock to intentional communities to fulfill emotional needs, but the capacity of a community’s relational skills are quickly tested by the personalities of its members: ‘If you go deep in a group, you can find all the light and shadows of humanity.’

Here's an article that talks a little more in depth about why intentional communities fail. Currently there are still people out there trying out communal living. Here’s an article in NYMag about it and an article in the Washington Post about it. They live together based on shared values like intergenerational child-rearing, social justice, and environmental sustainability. I would think they have a higher success rate than the communities I have looked at above because they are smaller and nobody is bound to them forever.